this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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I honestly don't think this is true, I think it's the savior part that made it successful.
Say you're a shitty person by stealing, lying, slept with married women and being a con man. If you can repent in your older years and all is forgiven by god, that releases the guilt.
In my mind, guilt is the emotion of control for most major religions. If you give rules that if you break are super "wrong," but actually human nature (like sex), you will be able to control the masses. The religion alone can release the guilt that the religion made up.
Humans are a herd animal. It is in our genetics, our genes, our nature, to follow a pack leader. Religion was the method of establishing this pack leader well before we had any notion of 'nation' or 'statehood' or 'ethnic identity'. All religions are founded in their basic concept based on this natural human herd instinct. And like any herd, the leadership is always determined by some violent confrontation between leadership contenders to determine which person will be the alpha, or dominant, leader. Unfortunately, humans tend to forget that we are animals in our nature, and behave just like all other animals, except that we are just a bit more intelligent than many other species and a lot more aggressively competitive.
So with this in mind, humans were bound by nature to have religion, and to be lead by a religious leader (before we invented statehood, after the Peace of Westphalia). Basically, the only choice humans had was 'what religion'? it is a matter of which religion was the most aggressive, and after that factor, the most appealing. The 'savior' part made it 'appealing', but 'aggression' was still the major factor. Christianly may have been appealing before Constantine, but it was not aggressive until he brought the military power of the Roman Empire behind it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia